OSPT Alliance launches CIPURSE certification process

CARTES AND IDENTIFICATION 2011, PARIS: The Open Standard for Public Transport (OSPT) Alliance announced that it has begun the first phase of its certification program for the CIPURSE open security standard, establishing the functional application-level specification compliance testing to certify CIPURSE products used for automated transit fare collection systems.

The OSPT is partnering with Soliatis, a well-respected global testing tools provider and testing laboratory, to perform the certification testing, which will help transit operators ensure that contactless fare cards, NFC smartphone apps and other products will work with fare collection systems based on the CIPURSE standard.

"CIPURSE application certification is an important first step in the overall CIPURSE certification process, which will eventually include a variety of ecosystem products, and we anticipate that products using these applications will begin receiving certification by the end of this year," said Laurent Cremer, executive director for the OSPT Alliance. "We are very pleased to be working with Soliatis on the compliance testing and on developing and supplying alliance members with affordable test plan, test suite and test tools necessary to help prepare products for certification."

Soliatis, which is based in Salon de Provence, France, will check the conformity of the application layer for CIPURSE products and provide test suites based on a common environment it has developed called the Scriptis Framework. Soliatis will also provide pre-certification debugging sessions where vendors can get help preparing their products for certification testing.